Estes Park Trail Gazette: It shouldn’t be a surprise that we believe newspapers are vital to a community.

When we are at our best, we are looking out for your interests, whether you are a resident, a commuting worker or a visitor who loves this special place.

Every newspaper, no matter the size, has a charge to act as a watch dog of local institutions to keep them accountable to the community as a whole. That means if a local public board is acting in a way that is inappropriate, it is up to the local newspaper to say something. That is one reason we write editorials every week.

Unfortunately an editorial we wrote on Jan. 12 titled “Visit Estes Park needs to work on transparency” seems to have had the opposite effect than we were hoping for.

Recently we noticed a string of emails between two members of the Visit Estes Park Board of Directors in the publicly available email records of Mayor Todd Jirsa, which we reported on with a story in the Wednesday, May 17 edition. The back and forth was between Board President Steve Kruger and Treasurer Charley Dickey.

Dickey shared the emails with the mayor, making them easy to find by a member of the public. In this string of emails Kruger objected to this action by Dickey and even marked his emails with the subject line: Private and Confidential.

What were these private emails about? Re-scheduling a meeting of the Visit Estes Park Board.